The new Iraq must be independent from U.S.

Ian Hurd

Published
4:00 am PDT, Wednesday, April 9, 2003

There are two distinct challenges in rebuilding Iraq: one physical and the other political. The United States will likely find itself with too little help in the first of these tasks and too much help in the second. Both will mean serious problems.

The first, and easier of the two, is the reconstruction of the physical infrastructure of the country: roads, bridges, power plants and the rest of the concrete skeleton of a modern society. It will have to be rebuilt quickly before the local population suffers unduly. This is the kind of task that the U.S. military is good at.

The second half of the rebuilding challenge is the reconstitution of the political and social framework of the country. This means making new institutions to replace those that lie in ruins after decades of authoritarian dictatorship, and creating a sense of common identity among the people, all the while remaining relatively friendly to U.S. interests and goals. This is the more difficult task and one for which the U.S. military is not well-suited.

The recent record of U.S. social reconstruction efforts is not sparkling. We have, of course, the example of Afghanistan, where a successful military action was followed by a quick shift to a decentralized governance based on the cooperation of regional warlords. Not wishing to try to demilitarize these groups, the United States chose instead to let them retain their power in the hope they would remain friendly to the new Karzai government in the capital. This arrangement has already shown signs of strain.

The real expertise for rebuilding civil societies lies in the United Nations, which spent much of the 1990s forced into the civil-reconstruction business and learned important lessons through hard experience. From all this learning, it has had some notable successes. In East Timor, U.N. teams took over after a period of brutal repression by Indonesian-backed militias and in about two years months built a new judicial system, police force and civil administration. The result is the new country of Timor-Leste, which joined the United Nations as a full member on Sept. 27.

To accomplish both the physical and the political tasks, the United States will enlist outside aid. For the first, it will be approaching other countries for money. In the second, it will been seeking advice and expertise on writing constitutions, organizing civil administration and legitimizing the whole package to the public. It is likely that the United States will find few volunteers to pay for the first task, but a long line of interested parties are willing to advise on the second. There are dangers here, too.

In rebuilding the social framework of the country, each interest group inside and outside Iraq will press for a different kind of political reconstruction; these competing demands will likely be irreconcilable. The groups internal to Iraq all have different interests for the postwar settlement, and the neighboring countries have long-standing interests of their own as well. The Shiite majority, for instance, wants a very different kind of country than do the Kurds in the north or the Sunni minority who have run things under Saddam Hussein. If these groups fight it out in peaceful elections, the result would likely be a Shiite government sympathetic to Iran. Though this would carry electoral legitimacy, it is unlikely to be acceptable to Washington. Given all of these competing parties, the U.S. interim administration is likely to have too much help in the political reconstruction of Iraq, rather than too little.

The wrong solution to this problem is for the United States to use its military might to impose a government. This would only alienate the population and repeat the mistakes of the past. A better solution will require drawing on the expertise of the United Nations and other agencies with a better record in social reconstruction. What they then build in Iraq will be less clearly in line with American interests, but it should be more durable as a result.

This signals the final paradox in the reconstruction: the only viable postwar regime for Iraq will be an anti-American one, although preferably one that is only moderately so. Because the new government will be quickly rejected by local populations if it is seen as too much the instrument of U.S. interests, for both its domestic and regional legitimacy it will have to be able to take an independent position. This will mean the occasional diplomatic affront to American interests.

The Bush administration believes that this war will demonstrate American strength to the world; we should hope that it is strong enough to permit a future Iraq that acts quite independently of the United States.